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Alcide’s sKan identifies security issues as well as Ops best practices in K8s deployment files, helm charts and kustomized resources

TEL AVIV, Israel, April 9, 2020 – Alcide, the Kubernetes security leader empowering DevSecOps teams with end-to-end continuous security guardrails for Kubernetes deployments, today announced the release of sKan, an open and free command line tool that brings Alcide Security Platform to the hands of developers, DevOps and Kubernetes application builders. sKan enables developers to scan Kubernetes configuration and deployment files as part of their application development as well as CI pipelines. Developers can download the tool here and start scanning their Kubernetes deployment files, Helm charts or Kustomized resources.

Developers today are required to better understand security implications, identify risk and implement application hardening as part of their day-to-day practice. Alcide sKan, powered by technology behind Alcide Advisor and Open Policy Agent (OPA), is a software translation of DevSecOps culture and shifting security left to the hands of developers building Kubernetes-based applications. Alcide sKan complements Kubernetes application builders’ choice of deployment framework tooling, whether this is via Helm charts, Kustomized resources or plain Kubernetes resource files (Yaml/Json). While scanning source code for security vulnerabilities is a common practice, possible configuration errors in Kubernetes environments is often overlooked and vulnerabilities are often unwittingly introduced to production.

Alcide sKan helps filling the Kubernetes security skills gap engineering teams often experienced by putting in developers and DevOps hands a tool that provides immediate feedback on security issues, risk, hardening and best practices, of Kubernetes deliverables, before even commiting to a single line of code or deploying.

“What we keep hearing from our customers and prospects is that they want to bring the K8s security insights to developers early on,” says Gadi Naor, Alcide’s CTO and co-founder. “How can we bring the insights from Alcide Kubernets Advisor to the hands of developers that build applications running on Kubernetes in the most automated and seamless manner? This is why we created sKan, to serve as a checkpoint tool for developers that is available in their comfort zone without interrupting their development workflow.”

Each sKancovers a broad range of potential security risks Kubernetes application builders must care about: from verifying that deployment files are not configured to run privileged, nor introduce risks to Kubernetes worker nodes, through RBAC sanitation checks, identifying secret leaks and many more. Alcide sKan presents actionable insights for each detected risk to help improve the security of first-party software built in-house as well as third-party software deployment files or Helm charts.

In addition to sKan, Alcide is providing educational resources and teaming up with other leading technology companies to provide valuable and free content for developers. Some recent articles and upcoming webinars for the cloud-native developer community are:

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The State of Kubernetes Adoption and Security

Alcide secures Kubernetes multi-cluster deployments from code-to-production. Companies use Alcide to scale their Kubernetes deployments without compromising on security. This enables the smooth operation of business apps while protecting cloud deployments from malicious attacks.